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Pest Pulse wants to bring much-needed tech to the 'unglamorous' world of pest control

As part of our weekly Startup Spotlight series, we profile the one-year old tech company.

BRIAN MONAGHAN HAD spent years working at early-stage startups before he got the “niche” idea of bringing technology to the pest control industry.

Monaghan was previously chief financial officer of CurrencyFair and spent a stint in the US with food delivery outfit Zoomer.

When it came time to start his own business, luck would turn his attention to a sector that he felt was in need of a tech facelift.

The family of his old college friends, Tim O’Toole, runs Pestguard, one of Ireland’s biggest pest control companies.

“He’s always been giving out about the lack of technology in pest control so we just basically started looking at it, digging in deeper,” Monaghan says.

“We came to the conclusion that technology is fully applicable to pest control as it is to any other verticals, such as taxis or restaurants. It’s fully applicable to pest control, it’s just that nobody has done it.”

This led to the creation of Dublin-based Pest Pulse in 2017 – co-founded with O’Toole, John O’Gara and Wassim Magnin – which aims to bring smart devices and software to the largely untouched sector.

But Monaghan admits that it’s a niche industry. It’s worth about $17 billion annually, which in the venture capital landscape is small pickings.